Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve the presentation of a set of search results in response to a search query generated by a user. The user may submit the search query against many types of search engines indexing many types of data sets, including a set of web resources (including a small set of pages, such as an intranet or the pages of a website), a set of media objects such as images or musical performances, a set of records in a database, or a set of advertisements for various products and services. The search results may then be presented to the user in many ways (e.g., as a set of uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to the search results comprising web resources, or as a tiled set of thumbnails representing various images selected from an image database.)
A more recent trend within the field of computing is the rise of social networking, wherein users may establish associations representing relationships with other users, and may share data of interest with all or some associated users. In this context, a user may establish a social profile comprising data that identifies various aspects of the user to associated users, such as demographic information, a set of interests such as hobbies or professional skills, and a set of resources that are interesting to the user. Users may choose to share certain social data items with other users (e.g., public or targeted messages, images such as photos, files, and references to interesting resources, such as a web page of a website.) The user may also choose to draw attention to social data items shared by other users (e.g., by “reposting” the social data items to appear within a news feed associated with the user.) The social network may permit the user to specify the extent of sharing (e.g., whether a social data item is to be shared with specified individual users or groups of users, with any associated user who has an association with the user, with any user of the social network, or with users outside of the social network.) In this manner, users may share social data items over the social network with other users.